Create an Educational Escape Room Workshop - June 2026

Wonderful.

All right, so today's workshop is creating an educational escape room.

And we are going to design an interactive, engaging experience that, that is really specific to the content that you're teaching.

We had so many different content areas, in the chat.

And I am excited that an escape room can really mold itself to a variety of teaching topics.

So before we get started, if you did not get the workbook, I am just going to, drop these links in the chat quick.

And already my, there is a canva link.

If you use canva, this will come across as a template and you can write on it and type in it.

Essentially if you're looking to print it, the link is in a Dropbox folder.

You do not need an account.

when it comes through, you just need to down push the download button at the top there.

So those two links are in the chat then.

All right, so the goal for today's, workshop is to really create an activity that is customized and unique to your own learning objectives.

A lot of times when you see an escape room or someone else has built one, it's not really tailored to your content or the topics that you are teaching in in your course.

So the goal today is to really build something really customized to what you teach.

So an escape room is really an active learning tool.

So when I say active learning, I'm talking about just alternatives to lecture.

And this can be a variety of case studies, simulation.

But an escape room is really just an active learning tool.

And there is quite a bit of research around active learning escape rooms as a teaching tool.

If you would like that, please just email me.

I have quite an accumulation of studies that I can send you, but the main topics are that it increases, engagement and participation.

We build confidence in clinical decision making.

There, is an emotional connection which we're going to get into when we talk about the storytelling, step of building this.

And it also lets students practice clinical judgment in a safe place.

So again, an escape room is just an active learning tool.

And with this workshop today, the goal is to build the first three foundational steps which are writing out your learning objectives, creating a storyline which really ties it together, and then building a mind map.

And when I, developed this workshop, I added in time that you will get to work on these so that you can submit your artifacts, at the end to earn the CE credit.

All right, so, I don't know where my chat went, sorry, if there's any questions at all as we get started, please put them in the chat and I will try to get to them, at the end of the session.

All right, so the first step we're going to start with is writing, the learning objectives.

Here.

We're going to first decide on an overall concept and then write the specific learning objectives.

So here are some ideas and these are going to be for the more specific objectives as you get to writing them before that, even though I want you to decide on a big concept.

So for this, for this workshop I'll use an escape room that I developed for type AH2 diabetes.

And it is actually this, this little kit here that I have.

Oops, kind of hard to see.

But it, I wrote, I did this process to create this escape room experience and the big concept was type 2 diabetes.

So then once you have that decided for your content, you're going to write out your specific object.

So those ideas are, over on this side of the screen here.

And I would suggest writing between seven to nine objectives.

If you would like a, about a 45 minute learning experience or activity.

choose a variety of different concepts from there.

So not all assessment learning objectives.

You should kind of pick and choose, which ones work best for your content.

If you're, if you are looking to do this, for about 30 minutes less objectives, probably about four to five.

If you would like a full hour, I would do nine plus objectives.

So this is, again I'm using the example of this type 2 diabetes, activity that I created and these were the five objectives that I wrote for that.

These can be in whatever format works for you.

I just like student will.

And then what I would like them to complete by the end, you can use Bloom's taxonomy.

You can use whatever your school uses, whatever style they use to write objectives.

in the workbook, there was a little mistake.

I had some learning objectives for this workshop built in there.

So I just kind of.

There's one at the top and one at the bottom.

But, these five in the middle are the ones that I wrote for the type 2, diabetes escape room.

So let's get on to the first action step.

I am going to set the timer for five minutes and here is where you're going to write the objectives for your own educational escape room.

So remember, we have the Big concept.

It could be, type 2 diabetes.

It could be a learning, the end of a learning unit.

Another one that I created when I was teaching was, I had a class right before a test on oncology, hematology, and I didn't quite know what to do with that class.

It didn't have a lot of energy.

It was, it was lecture heavy.

So I, I chose that bigger concept, or a unit review, and then wrote the learning objectives out from there.

So I'm going to set the timer for five minutes and we'll come back and go to the next step.

Oops.

All right, hopefully you were able to write, the objectives for the time limit that you had in class.

I would love to hear.

I'm just going to put a little quiz up here.

Can you all see that?

How many, learning objectives that you ended up with?

I just want to share the results, so you can kind of see where your peers are at.

All right, let's see if I can share this.

Can you see the.

I had a lot of four fives, nine, seven.

that didn't share very well.

great.

So we have some short escape room experiences and some longer ones as well.

Okay, let's move on then to step two, which is developing a storyline.

So here we are going to determine how students will succeed or escape, depending on how you design it.

And for the, the teaching portion of this, we'll refer to this as the end goal.

And we're also going to decide on a location for a story.

So story is essential to create an escape room because it really ties everything together and prevents it from being just a bunch of jumbled worksheets with some numeric locks put in it.

Really.

as humans, we learn from story.

If you think about your most impactful lessons as an educator, they probably come from stories.

I, think about like I had a patient once who, when I was working in the and I transferred them up to the icu and the ICU nurses, being the excellent nurses that they were, turned the patient, to do a thorough skin assessment and he had his TV remote stuck between his back shoulder blades.

And that is a much more impactful lesson about the importance of skin breakdown and skin assessment than a PowerPoint.

I'm sure we have all seen so many PowerPoints like this, workshops like this, and you don't really necessarily return to those but stories that are your favorite, your favorite movies, your favorite books, you actually come back to them, you have an emotional investment in them.

And we can really build that for our students in this escape room and create that emotional connection which really makes the learning really sticky.

story can also provide a lot of context especially for those who teach fundamentals or pre licensure even they don't have a lot of clinical context.

So providing a story gives them something to build their knowledge on rather than just like what is a normal potassium.

We can create a patient that has potassium imbalance, has kidney failure, maybe they missed dialysis because there was a snowstorm.

And it just creates a lot of context around that potassium value.

story also gives a lot of structure.

It's kind of the connective tissue between this.

Without a storyline your escape room will feel very random and disconnected.

Did but tying together your first station and your last station with a story makes the whole experience feel more like a journey rather than just like a series of tasks.

The other thing is that story can really lower student anxiety.

It prevents it from feeling like an evaluation or a test and it can add to or it can help students kind of work through some more complex problems without feeling like they're going to fail.

so the other piece is that nursing is really inherently narrative.

and every patient that we encounter is really like a story that's unfolding.

So adding this to the escape room is a really strong way to mirror what happens in clinical practice.

So you don't need to be overly creative or an excellent writer to build this story.

It's just setting it up with intention and it giving the students a setting a problem to solve and they will engage with that naturally.

So a few different ideas for your end goal.

These are healthcare related location or end goals.

I'm sorry, this is what the, what you want the students to end the activity with.

So maybe it's discharging a patient, change of shift, transfer.

any one of these make really great endings for your story.

There's also non healthc care related end goals and these are all listed in the workbook too if you if you need to reference them again.

So depending on what your learning objectives are, these can be relevant, creative or fun to do.

it real.

These non healthcare related ones really lower the emotional stakes.

they work great for like a group of high school students who are maybe exploring healthcare careers.

Maybe it's the first day of class, maybe it's a team building exercise or an icebreaker that you are doing for a unit meeting.

These work well when the goal is really like buy in engagement, energy building, teamwork.

And rather than teaching clinical content, if you really want to enforce like clinical topics, I would definitely go with the healthcare end goals.

So that's one choice that you'll need to make is what your end goal is going to be.

The second one is the location, the setting of the story.

So again these are healthcare related locations.

and depending on your learning objectives that's definitely going to change.

But I, I did want to highlight that it does not need to be in acute care.

Right.

We can go a lot of different places as nurses and especially if you don't have clinical, maybe at hospice, it could be a great setting to expose students to a different healthcare location.

But again, if you want to make it a little more fun, there are some non healthcare related location ideas or themes as well.

So again these work best if the goals for your escape room are really team building, creating energy in a classroom, first day activities, maybe an orientation to a clinical unit, something like that.

That's not a clinical topic.

So here are the questions to answer as you're building the story for your escape room.

And these you can take some time to go through.

We're going to have a little work time again here.

but these need to be communicated to the students at the start of the escape room because they need to know what they're working towards.

What is the end goal?

How do I know when this story is done?

The question at the bottom two I just wanted to highlight is how many patients do you need to tell the story?

And I think that adding more patients can certainly cover more clinical topics.

It also adds to the complexity.

But that is certainly an option to you if you want to develop an escape room that has multiple patients.

When I was doing the oncology, hematology one when I developed that I had multiple patients because I needed to cover leukemia, lymphoma, anemia and there was no way one patient could have all of those conditions.

So just depending on what your learning objectives are, you can do a multi, patient room as well.

All right, so we are on to our next workstation and this one is developing your end goal and location.

So you can take this time to answer those questions on the previous slide or write out your setting, your location and the end goal for your students.

So remember, this is really what ties everything together and prevents it from just feeling like a series of tasks.

All right, I'm Going to start the timer.

And this is also the second submission for the artifacts at the end for the CE credit.

All right, hopefully we're all able to finish.

I, am going to put up a little poll again if you wanted to put in what you decided for your end goal and your setting or your location to share with your peers.

I'm sure that there is a lot of curiosity in the group as far as what other people are creating.

There is just a little bit of discussion in the chat about, PowerPoint or virtual escape rooms.

I will get, I will grab a link during the next, during the next work section.

I do have a short video about building an escape room in Google forms.

If you want to create a virtual one, a physical escape room, yes.

In person is, more labor intensive.

I will say yes.

And there can also be some cost associated with it because you may need some props or tools.

but a virtual one is a great option if you're looking for something quick.

All right, let me see if I can show you.

The screen.

I'm just going to read off a couple of these.

some people are putting in the chat too.

That's great.

setting of older adult adults home when they're returning home from a stroke.

infection control, cardiac, progressive unit.

Recognize the signs and symptoms of deterioration.

someone who went to dialysis.

Worst shift ever.

I like that as a setting.

We've all been there.

pneumonia prevention, postpartum, hemorrhage, telemetry unit, serotonin, syndrome.

That is one thing that I do like about an escape room is you can make it very specific to, the content that you are teaching.

If you are teaching about serotonin syndrome, that is amazing.

Transfer out of the icu, phlebotomy draw in a provider's office.

These are wonderful.

All right, you guys are going to create some amazing, some amazing escape rooms.

All right, let's get back to our work then.

Okay, the third step then is to design the puzzles.

And before we really get to the puzzles, I do want to work on creating a mind map.

So in this section we are going to sketch out a mind map, that brings together your learning objectives, any ideas that you have for puzzles and your setting, and then you can start to choose the types of puzzles that work best for your learning objectives.

So a mind map is very similar To a concept map.

And it's just a sketch that kind of shows the flow of your escape room.

So there's two basic types of flow.

for this, linear is the easiest to build.

It is one puzzle that students complete and it leads them to the next puzzle and so on through all of your learning objectives.

It's just one on top of the other.

a non linear escape room is a little more difficult to build, a little more complex puzzles can branch off in different directions.

Students may need to uncover a clue in one puzzle, a clue in a second puzzle, and use them together to unlock the next puzzle.

So if you are building your first escape room, I would definitely start with a linear version.

If you are looking for something more challenging, you can choose the nonlinear.

Here is an example of a nonlinear.

This is, for a, current deck that I'm building.

And you can see there are lots of lines and lots of complexity in there.

So, that's just an example of a non linear mind map.

Now, I could not figure out how to, show you this sketch, live in this workshop.

So I'm gonna just play a quick video of me going through how I sketch out a mind map.

Now, I start with the end goal in mind, and, that's a great place to start.

You can start at the beginning, but just have the end goal on your paper so that you know where you're headed.

the other context that I just wanted to give you around this video is that, it is for the type 2, diabetes case study that I've been using as an example throughout this.

And in this case study, the, the patient goes missing.

That is kind of my end goal.

So they want to find him.

Students need to find him at the end.

Now, I had a very specific idea that I wanted to use a black light puzzle in this.

So I had a flashlight and I had batteries, and that's coming together, for my end goal.

You didn't.

I had ideas about the puzzles that I wanted.

If you don't have ideas about the puzzles, that's okay.

If you do have ideas, certainly add them into your mind map.

All right, let's get to the video then.

the idea with a mind map, and I feel like the best way to start it is to start with the end goal in mind.

And remember this is like the grand puzzle that you want students to figure out at the end of your escape room.

So the end goal in this puzzle is, to locate the room of a missing patient.

The, puzzle for that is going to be entering that room number into a Google form.

So that is my end goal.

And now I'm going to build off some pieces.

Now there's a linear escape room, which would just be one puzzle after another.

This one is going to be nonlinear, which is a bit more complex.

so start wherever you feel comfortable.

First, the two things that they're going to need to solve this, are going to be flashlight and batteries.

So those are my two, puzzle pieces that need to come together in order to get to this end goal.

Now I can start adding in kind of my learning objectives here.

So the first learning objective that I want to include is, carb counts.

And this one has three pieces coming off of it.

Then.

So we're going to have, a breakfast, A lunch and a dinner piece.

So the puzzles that I'm going to have here are, again, based on my learning objectives.

The first one is going to be hypo and hyperglycemic symptoms.

And then I'm also going to have a patho puzzle.

I have a path of learning objective.

And then I'm also going to have a farm puzzle, which specifically relates to oral medications.

And that's going to be my third arm.

Now over on this side, I want this one to be specific to insulin dosing.

That's another one of my learning objectives here.

And that one's just going to be kind of independent.

I can tie it into the patient overall, but this one does not have any other branching arms.

Another layer that you can add to this is a, puzzle related to discovery of the patient or the end goal.

So what are you going to give them to kind of introduce the patient or to introduce the puzzles.

And that can connect, down to here.

So this is a basic format for setting up a mind map.

trying to get my video back on.

One second.

There we go.

Okay, so that was a sketch again of that type 2 diabetes, escape room.

The other layer that you can add into your mind map, or if you need more structure, is to use clinical judgment model or, the nursing process, whatever you are most comfortable with, and kind of layering that down the side of your mind map.

So maybe you start with noticing, interpreting, responding, and finally, reflection at the end.

And again, this can help you kind of tie in and really mirror clinical, practice as well.

So we're going to get to the, step of creating your mind map.

This one is the third and final artifact of your, of, this workshop.

So grab a blank sheet of paper Write the end goal at the bottom and you could start building backwards if that makes sense for you.

If you would like to start from the beginning and use the clinical judgment model to build down, that works too.

But you're tying in your objectives and then any ideas that you have for puzzles along the way.

This is the work section.

I'm giving you about 10 minutes to complete that and when we get back, we'll wrap up and I'll get to the form for submitting your artifacts.

All right, welcome back.

Hopefully you had a very productive work session.

I'm just going to launch this last quick, quiz.

If you chose, either a linear or a non linear map to build.

I'm not sure if you guys can see those results or not, but it is about 70, percent linear, 30% nonlinear.

So interesting.

Yep, it's kind of holding steady there.

Well, well done.

You have completed the first three foundational steps for building your own educational escape room.

here, there it's seen.

So we ended at 71 and 29.

Amazing.

All right, we have completed those first three foundational steps and you are well on your way to creating an educational escape room specific and tailored to the content that you teach.

I am going to.

In the chat I did put the link to my short video on using Google forms to build, virtual escape rooms.

And I'm also going to add the link to fill out with your artifacts for the CE credits.

So you'll need to submit those three artifacts which are learning objectives, your storyline and your mind map.

Now I do have spaces in the form for either a text submission or if you were taking like physical notes on a notebook, you can just take a picture and upload your work that way.

Also, once that is submitted, I will get those certificates to you within two to three days.

we also have just a little bit of time for any questions.

If you want to add anything into the chat, I would be happy to answer those.

So there, there were quite a few questions about ideas for puzzles and I do I do have a full create an educational escape room course where I demonstrate, about 40 to 50 puzzle ideas.

I have there.

It's like a lot of video Lessons.

there's a full puzzle book, puzzle idea book in there.

I, I can't talk about it too much during the credit session though.

If you want to stay after, I could show you.

Any other, questions.

Okay, great.

I will hang out for a little bit after.

The link is just above here.

I'll drop it in the chat, again, for the forum to submit your artifacts.

I'll also be sending it an email, right after this.

Yes, I will send information, in the email as well.

All right, I will watch for all of your submissions.

I am very excited to see what you guys are creating.

I know that nurse educators are some of the most innovative, creative people, and I think that you guys are going to come up with some really, fun, engaging and clinically relevant educational escape rooms.